Ideas to Deliver Professional Development in Online Communities – Ep 14

In this episode, we discuss content. The most important thing you can do as a community leader is to create good content that your community will enjoy and benefit. We’ll talk about the 4 best places to host your content.

Episode Highlights:

Closed Facebook Groups and Pages

Kami talks about streaming content to a private Facebook group. You can do this directly or use tools that allow you to stream into a closed group. These tools even allow you to invite a guest speaker to present to your group without joining directly, which eliminates the awkward problem of adding someone then dropping them afterward.

Madalyn recommends inviting your email subscribers to attend a webinar. Using webinar software, you can present your webinar live, record it, then offer it in replay later.

Just a few of the webinar tools you can check out are WebinarJam, GoTo Webinar, Zoom, Easy Webinar, Webinar Ninja, BlueJeans and GoTo Meeting (see links below).

All these programs have a free trial, so you can test them out and see which one works best for you and which have the integrations that are most important to you.

Open Live Streams

Facebook Pages/Profiles, Periscope/Twitter and YouTube are great places to livestream and deliver great content to your community.

A tip from Madalyn: If are just starting and aren’t yet completely comfortable with livestreaming, you can set your stream to private instead of public until you’re comfortable doing it. Kami started a Facebook group to play around with the tech that only includes herself and a few people from her team.

Stream on more than one platform if you can because different platforms attract different audiences. Address and acknowledge each audience to let them know you see and hear them.

At the Houston Social Media Breakfast live event, Kami uses her computer to stream to Facebook, and her phone to stream to Twitter.

Course Platforms

There are quite a few Software as a Service (SaaS) companies that will house your online training content, or you can build it yourself on your website. These platforms aren’t free, but they give you the ability to deliver content in a professional way.

Some platforms you might want to look into include Thinkific, Teachable, Kajabi and Ambition Ally, which you can use to build a community on your own website (see links below).

Call to Action:

Tweet us @madalynsklar and @kamichat or visit our Facebook page, Communities That Convert, to tell us which platform most appeals to you to deliver educational content to your community. In the next episode, we’re going to dig in a little deeper and talk about the 7 types of content to deliver.

We have a new community on Facebook. We will extend the conversation from each episode and deliver bonus content. Sign up for our email list at http://bit.ly/CTCVIP to get an invitation to join.